


Vivien & Merlin

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Possession - A. S. Byatt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-23
Updated: 2007-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:35:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christabel and Randolph in Scarborough -- when they "agreed on that last black day to leave, to leave each other and never for a moment look back."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vivien & Merlin

**Author's Note:**

> Smut was deemed "welcome but not required" -- alas, I couldn't fit it in to the general mood, which came out very sad. BUT I love the book, and hope I did it -- if not justice, then no injustice.
> 
> Written for tree

 

 

_Were I not woman, I could tell a tale -- "Merlin & Vivien," Tennyson_

It was their last day. They had agreed, much earlier, not to speak of the end of their stay together, last days and what might lie beyond them; there was nothing behind and nothing before this time. It was the vital centre of both their lives, where the currents of their existence had brought them, to this pool which joined, mingled, them. But it was like a pool, circular, self-contained. Sufficient unto itself, like her.

"I heard a lecturer in college once say," he said to her, because he loved her mind and because he saw life through the lens of literature, "that 'Time' is the most important word in Shakespeare's sonnets. As a young man, I was skeptical. What about 'Beauty'? What about 'Love'?" He paused, thinking.

She smiled, and not gently. "What about love, indeed?" she asked, with what he knew would seem a demure manner to anyone else. Her face was lowered, her gaze lowered, her pale eyelashes dark against her fair skin. But she glanced at him, and her eyes flashed.

He shook his head at her, but smiled in return, and went on. "But now, I think he -- I thought him quite old at the time, but he was just my age now, perhaps younger, even -- "

"Then in truth, he _was_ old," she said very gravely.

"-- He was right," he said, equally grave. "'Time' is the most important word."

"It always is," she said. "In Shakespeare, or any other work."

"You are always ahead of me," he said, no longer smiling. "Far ahead, always running. Like Atalanta." He thought of temptation and apples, and ruefully said no more.

"'Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair'?" she quoted to him, her face, her smile, her tone still all half-mocking, but with sadness in it, too. Like her, he thought, elemental but mingled, fire and water, earth and air.

"But we have caught, and kissed," he parried back, smiling -- they both enjoyed this game of wits, half quoting, half challenge. "At least you have caught me," he went on, teasing, "held me fast. And see, there was nothing to fear." His happiness -- call it rightly, his joy -- was making him bold, careless, too comfortable. She saw this; she observed it, calmly, and continued on, eyes mostly on the ground, alert for danger, traps.

They were walking along the seaside, in Scarborough, both neatly dressed, not holding hands nor exchanging speaking glances, models of decorum and civility. Nobody could tell he was burning inside, he thought, burning for her. The thought excited him still further. It was blinding, like the light of the waves flashing off the sea. Nobody could tell the truth of their situation; they were any other man on woman, enjoying a holiday. A respite, however brief.

She looked ahead, along down the beach, not at him. "You cannot catch me," she said, calmly and clearly. "You cannot hold me."

His heart stood still. "No, my love, I cannot," he said, just as quietly.

 _"You_ cannot be Janet," she went on, with her sly, cutting humor. "As I cannot be Tam Lin."

His watch ticked at her waist; earlier, he had wanted to time the high and low tides at some tidepools, but his arms had been full of captured treasures -- specimens, as he called them. He had bid her fasten it to her girdle, to help him keep track of the time. She had smiled, but done as he asked.

Catching sight of it, he stopped and held out his hand for it -- she stopped, too, uncharacteristically hesitant for a moment, then caught his meaning and nodded once, slightly. Undoing the watch, she held it out to him, but he would not take it; she dropped it into his palm, and his fingers closed hard on hers.

"We cannot be other than who we are," he agreed, his humor also more than a little grim. "As Aristotle says, we cannot change our essences." She looked up into his face, the green eyes changeable as the waves behind her, her gaze fierce, cold, calm. He let her hand go, and they resumed walking as if nothing had happened.

"Christabel," he said, voice betraying his urgency, although his face was calm and he walked at the same slow, calm collectors' pace as she did, eyes alert for whatever the sand or sea might yield. "Tomorrow -- "

"You were the one who said, let us not speak of time," she said, calm and mild as ever -- almost placid. But it was deception, the way the fine smooth silver appearance of the moon concealed its fierce, desolate landscape of ash and frozen crystal mountains, the impacts of craters perfectly preserved in the airless void.

"You are my love," he said, low. "You are my life. I cannot live without you."

She shook her head, and he saw that she was angry -- and knew, too late, he had given her an opening. "'Men have died, from time to time -- '"

"' -- And worms have eaten them. But not for love,'" he finished, harder, angry. Discontent. He stopped walking again, to look at her -- circled round her so the sea was no longer behind her, its glittering distracting lights making her a figure of all shadow. "So no one shall die," he said sarcastically. "All shall be well. But what shall we _do?"_

He was sorry, then, because he could see her face plain, with the sun and sea behind him. She was white as if she had been stabbed, her blood drained. "We....we cannot go on, as we are now," she said, faltering, and his heart hurt for her. _I'm sorry,_ he wanted to say. _I unwish all my words._ "Not when we go back."

He shook his head. People walked past them, couples, men, women, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, now and then children, some arm-in-arm, some not speaking, some plainly dressed, some richly clothed, all of them intent on their own business, exclaiming at the sights and sounds and smells and even occasionally taking them in. They were anonymous as two atoms. "No," he said, very low. "I know, my dear."

"We went on....before," she said, still unsteady, still pale, but a little of the calm returning to her voice; clearly, she had thought this through. "Before we knew each other. We both lived, and it was not -- unendurable then."

He put his hands in his pockets, and looked off to the side, at the bright day. It seemed to him a storm was coming, but the winds were still; only a little sea-breeze played gently, like a summoned attendant spirit, an invisible but tangible sporting pet, like a dog. "No," he agreed. "Not unendurable. At all."

"You -- are married, and I...." But she could no longer go on. "We must go on as we did before," she said, voice shaking, only desiring now to say all that was in her mind, get it out, get him to agree. "We must go on....and never look back. Never meet again. Nor write."

He was still looking down the beach, the breeze still played -- he could feel sand and stones at the bottom of his pockets, and fingered them absently, the dark blidn contrast between the rough and the smooth, the difference between the stone and grain of sand only time. But he felt as he had seen her only a moment earlier -- drained, pale. The fire had gone out of everything, even her hair. All that was left was ash.

"It is hard," he said, finally, still not looking at her. "But....a fitting punishment? Like the way the wicked end, in fairy tales."

"What else can we do?" she asked, and now she was angry.

"Nothing," he said; and he whispered, finally looking back at her, "nothing." His agony was mirrored in her face. " -- Or mythology," he continued his thought, voice husky, but mind still making connections, galvanically, like a pithed frog. Motion without meaning. "Eurydice. I see, my dear, I do....if I look back at you....I will be lost."

"We are lost now," she said, voice low, bitterly.

"But what -- what is this?" His voice was angry, but low, his long, handsome face calm, quiet, inconsolably pained. "You -- you are my love. No, my life was _not unendurable,"_ he nearly spat, feeling her own words bitter on his tongue, like rusted coins. She did not shrink back, but drew away from him without moving, into herself, like a bird huddling up into its feathers. "But -- it was cold. You -- you are my fire. My hearth. My element. A salamander," he said, with a short sharp laugh, but she did not smile. "You burn without being consumed."

She shook her head. "Consumed with that which it was nourished by," she said, calmly as if correcting an inattentive pupil. "That is the correct quotation. We cannot continue....flame canot burn, without fuel."

"Never to speak to you again -- " His grief made him cruel. "Nor write a letter. Not even in the dedication of a poem?"

"Especially not in the dedication of a poem." Her voice was sharp again, its edge turned against him, and her glance flashed up.

"You condemn me to solitude," he said, voice low, wishing to hurt her as she hurt him.

 _"I --_ condemn _you_ to -- _I_ am not the one who -- " Her loud voice attracted unwelcome glances. Unwillingly stepping nearer him, she all but hissed: "I am not the one who is married to another. And you wrote her, all this time. Every night."

"I always do. So I had to continue always doing so," he said, mildly. "Else she would have suspected."

She drew away from him again, visibly regaining her composure, making her face into that cold, bland mask. He watched, fascinated. "If you write, I shall not answer," she told him, and he thought again she was reciting a speech she had planned, long ago. Before they had arrived here, even; perhaps when she had decided to join him. Or even before that. "I shall not call upon you." She glanced severely at him. "And no poem dedications."

"Nothing," he said, not in assent but as an echo, hopeless. "Nothing but what we have now."

"We have never had anything else," she said, cool, aloof, inflexible. 

"No, indeed," he agreed, voice savagely jovial. "The knight and his Belle Dame Sans Merci -- "

"I have never pretended to be anything other than what I am." Her voice was cold and hard. "If you must see me as _either_ your elemental fate, your destiny, your hearth" -- her tone was not withering but he winced -- _"or_ a selkie, a changeling, a serpent-woman, an enchantress, then -- then -- that is your affair," she ended lamely, as if she had been thinking of saying something else.

"Vivien and Merlin," he laughed sadly. "Melusina and Guy of Lusignan. Ariel and Prospero -- "

"Ariel set Prospero free," she said, very low.

"You are free," he said, matching her tone, trying to catch her eyes, daring to reach out and put two fingers underneath her chin, to bring her face back, lift her gaze; then he drew back as if her cool skin had burned him, at the sight of her eyes.

"None of us are free." She was still glaring at him, her eye fixed like a hawk's; then, ridiculously, she turned a little and began walking again, slowly, as if they were simply having a quiet discussion on the clean sands by the calm waves, not breaking up with misery.

"I would be free -- I would set you free, if I could -- I....I will," he said, matching her pace again, steps and heart leaden. "I will abide by your decision. It is....it is right." He sighed heavily. "It shows foresight, and resolution. As does all you do." He tried to smile at her, which brought tears to her own eyes. "No, no -- it is right -- you are right. 'Be free, and fare thou well.'"

She smiled to herself, a little, bitterly. "I am still confined," she said.

"Prospero's last charge is -- " He tried to remember. "Ah. '....calm seas, auspicious gales And sail so expeditious -- ' Will we not -- go back together?" he dared, knowing her answer. She shook her head, calm again, looking far off -- at what, he could not tell.

"'As you from crimes would pardon'd be, Let your indulgence set me free,'" she replied, for all the world as if they were still merely playing their game. "Then it is decided? You are in agreement?" She glanced up at him sidewise, and it occurred to him only then he could have argued, fought her, pressed his suit -- _I will rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails till Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters...._ She was still unsure.

"We have tonight....?" he tried again, voice changing timbre, dropping into a different register. "At least?"

"Yes," she sighed, in the same tone, looking up at him at last. "But in the morning...." She nearly yielded, thinking of waking up beside him, his warmth beside her, radiating from his body. "I shall go first," she decided firmly. "Before you wake."

"I shall not sleep," he said softly, smiling at her.

"Well, _I_ shall," she returned, sharp again, but relieved -- and disappointed, in him, in herself, in the world, she could not tell. "It is a long journey."

"It is indeed." His grave, inscrutable humor had returned, and he actually offered her his arm. She nearly laughed, but took it lightly, and they walked together as before, down the wide sweep of the beach, the waves beside them always changing, always the same, always returning.

 


End file.
